Crowston, Østerlund Funded for New NSF Citizen Science Project

Two School of Information Studies (iSchool) faculty members are exploring new ways of combining the efforts of citizen scientists and machine learning algorithms to classify data from a National Science Foundation-funded research initiative called “the most complicated experiment ever undertaken in gravitational physics.” Professor Kevin Crowston and co-investigator Associate Professor Carsten Østerlund are members of a team that has been awarded one million dollars by the National Science Foundation for their project, INSPIRE: Teaming Citizen Science with Machine Learning to Deepen LIGO’s View of the Cosmos, (15-47880). The project’s goal is to develop a citizen science system to support the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (aLIGO). The aLIGO experiment is expected to open up the window of gravitational wave observations on the Universe before the end of this decade, aLIGO…